Posted by u/tractorboynyc
We're losing ~9 languages per year. Each one may carry irreplaceable environmental knowledge. This new tool maps what's at risk before it disappears.
If current trends continue, 50% of the world's languages will be extinct by 2100. What makes this a future-facing problem: 75% of medicinal plant knowledge is unique to a single language (Camara-Leret & Bascompte 2021, PNAS). This isn't just cultural loss, it's the disappearance of environmental data systems that took centuries to calibrate. Fire management, flood prediction, agricultural timing, pharmacology. The tool linked here maps which endangered languages carry which types of knowledge, scored by likelihood of accuracy. The question for the future: can we build systematic preservation infrastructure before the knowledge disappears, or are we going to lose it the same way we lost the Library of Alexandria... by not realizing what we had until it was gone?
External link:
https://deeptime-research.org/tools/extinction/More from r/Futurology
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